


from eden

by julietcapulet



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23192005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/julietcapulet/pseuds/julietcapulet
Summary: Peeta reflects on the one piece of information that served as a psychological touchstone during his recovery after the Games and subsequent revolution.
Relationships: Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Comments: 3
Kudos: 51





	from eden

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kait1987](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kait1987/gifts).



> Just a drabble! TW for mentions of blood, violence, and PTSD. Title taken from Hozier's song, "From Eden," because I'm rubbish at titles, and because this song has some serious Toast-y vibes. (:

Green.

He couldn’t be sure of much, but he could, at least, be sure of green. Her favorite color.

For a while, it took everything in him to cling to reality. Every muscle, every beat of his heart, every ounce of blood in his body struggled against the tumultuous current of his mind, as if each thought threatened to send him tumbling back to the Quarter Quell arena, grasping onto the cornucopia while it spun impossibly out of control. A sobering reminder of his own helplessness. As if he was a child again, the same eleven-year-old boy who watched a young girl starving in the streets and could do nothing but burn his own bread to feed her. 

He hadn’t known her then, but already he was setting himself on fire to save her.

The girl whose favorite color was green.

In the end, though, she had saved herself. It was almost laughable now to think that anything he might have done -- anything he might have burned -- could have fed the wildfire that already blazed beneath her skin. Katniss Everdeen, the Girl on Fire. The torch that pierced through the darkness of Panem, glowing brighter than the sun. She guided them all back home, not just him. That was real.

Katniss Everdeen, the girl he had been in love with since he was eleven years old? Real. Katniss Everdeen, whose unthinkable acts of courage and heroism had guided their country out of the clutches of two corrupt dictators? Real. Katniss Everdeen, whose favorite color was green? Real. 

It was a game he played with himself for years after the Games from which it originated: Real or Not Real. It was how he navigated the ruined trenches of his own mind; it was how he was able to identify sanity and then disseminate it from his head to his hands, so that he could fold them into fists and crush the pain and anger and confusion into his palm rather than Katniss’s neck. He would close his eyes and he would play Real moments in his head over and over and over and he would clench his fist until his palms bled, because blood seemed to be the tribute his nervous system required to keep the rebellion of his brain at bay. 

And though it was blood he would give, it wasn’t red that Peeta saw when he closed his eyes and tithed that all-too-familiar fluid to anchor himself to reality. 

It was green.

He couldn’t trust much, but he could trust green. 

Green was, perhaps, the first truth Katniss had ever told him. Despite the uncertainty in their first Games and the torturous blur of confusion and deceit in the unending months that followed, Peeta knew that Katniss wasn’t lying about her favorite color that day on the train. He had held fast to that truth ever since she’d given it to him, as he held fast to it now.

For a while, it took everything in him to cling to reality. Now, all it took was the color green.

Whenever Peeta’s thoughts began to turn on him, whenever his mind started the rhetoric of sabotage that made the ridges of half-moon scars on his palms ache in expectation, Peeta would close his eyes and think of green. The blooms of spring that used to remind everyone, even all those years ago in the Seam, that beauty still existed amidst the ashes. The viridescence in the eyes of Finnick and Annie’s son. Katniss’s face the first time she had morning sickness after he’d convinced her that it was finally safe to start a family. 

These were the greens that brought Peeta back to reality -- greens of life, of love, of loss, of beauty. Of safety, stability. Of self-control.

In a way, green had become Peeta’s favorite color too. 

He’d told her orange, back on the train. A truth for a truth: a color for a color. He couldn’t have known, then, that he’d said orange almost as if he’d seen right through her to the inferno she was beneath. He couldn’t have known, then, that what she had given him was not just a color, but a lifeline -- a truth to believe in when he couldn’t believe in anything else. 

Green.

Like the meadow he picnicked in with Katniss as their children chased each other to the edge of the forest and back.

Everything, as far as the eye could see, was green. 

And all of it was Real.


End file.
